Friday, August 5, 2011

More on the DOE's anti-Ravitch strategy

Following up on yesterday's post re. the DOE's anti-Ravitch strategy, one need look no further than this disgusting piece ( "Double-Agent Diane") by willing anti-Ravitch think-tanker Jay Greene. Greene is a long-time hack fellow at the far right-wing Manhattan Institute where he shares a home with racist Bell Curve theorist Charles Murray. Not surprisingly, Greene and the Institute currently find common ground with Duncan and the D.O.E in their crusade against Ravitch, teacher unions, and support for privatization. If Greene's diatribe is any indication, they also share worries about last week's Save Our Schools March.

In an exchange of tweets yesterday, Duncan PR guy Justin Hamilton responded to a reporter's question about a secret anti-Ravitch group within the D.O.E. this way:

EDPressSec Justin Hamilton File under black helicopter RT @DianeRavitch: Reporter asked if I knew of secret DOE group working to intimidate/silence me.

Why do you guys lie about stuff that is so easily google-able? Charles Murray's latest book was published by Crown Forum, a division of Random House. No connection to Manhattan Institute whatsoever. In fact, Murray never published a book with the Manhattan Institute.

Anonymous (if that is indeed your real name") is right about dates of Murray's and Green's departures from MI. But that's a nit-picky defense of reactionary Greene. He didn't leave MI over political or ideological differences. He just took another job with a university-based, right-win school "reform" center." Murray went over to the the even more far-right American Enterprise Institute. But MI still prints his stuff and does interviews with him. See for example, http://www.citiesonahill.org/school_choice/ where MI promoted Greene's book: · Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About our Schools –and Why it Isn't So

So whether Murray and Green are officially members of the Institute today, is not the important thing. The point is that both still find common ground at the Manhattan Institute and elsewhere in the right-wing and racist think-tank world.

Even if Murray is racist, you're just trying to smear Greene with guilt by association, and even if Greene were somehow guilty of anything, that is completely irrelevant to his case against Ravitch (which is that she is embarrassing her own side by being so over-the-top . . . rhetoric like "genocidal" and the like).

At the time Murray began to explore the racist notions that led him and partner Hernstein, to write The Bell Curve, he was employed by the Bradley-funded Manhattan Institute. It was the far-right Bradley Foundation, the driving force behind both Murray and the institute, that pushed Murray to ultimately move from MI over to the American Enterprise Institute. Greene began working for MI in 2000 and left a short while ago to move to the Univ. of Arkansas where he has continued to write his pro-voucher, anti-union polemics.

Actually, Jay Greene is in many ways worse than the racist Murray. In this National Review article, Greene calls Murray, "a conservative most renowned for his book Losing Ground, which was a highly influential criticism of the modern welfare state."

But this praise is followed by a break with Murray over NCLB's standardized testing mania. Murray, writes Greene, "joins the chorus of NCLB discontents in arguing that high-stakes testing narrows student learning to include only test-taking skills, and that it discourages teachers whose autonomy is threatened. These are popular mantras of the teacher unions and others opposed to reforming the nation’s public-school system."

Above all else, Greene is a union hater which puts his anti-Ravitch diatribes into some perspective.

From one anonymous writer to another - the Manhattan Institute continues to support Charles Murry despite his efforts to try and prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, as published in his 1994 best-seller. For example, in Feburary of this year he was given a substantial promotion for his new book on their website. I should also mention that the infamous John Derbyshire, known for his most recent racially motivated column in the National Review, is also connected to the Manhattan Institute. This information is pretty easy to find on Google. My Point? MI is a very dangerous organization that operates under the pretense of "doing good" but with an ultimate goal of increasing the divide by perpetuating racism. According to online sources, they were even able to swindle their way into the City Of Newark,NJ, the largest African American City in the United States, and were ultimately hired by the City's black Mayor, Cory Booker, to run Newark's prisoner reentry program. How does something like this happen? It's pretty unbelievable...

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